CNN ups pressure on MSNBC's Harris-Perry

1/2/14 10:10 AM EST

CNN took a shot at MSNBC's Melissa Harris-Perry on Wednesday in a segment that tied the host's recent remarks about Mitt Romney's black grandchild to a string of controversies that have plagued the progressive cable news channel.

After noting that both Alec Baldwin and Martin Bashir had recently left MSNBC in the wake of highly controversial comments, CNN's Fredricka Whitfield said “some are calling for Melissa Harris-Perry to be fired."

"Some" amounted to a handful of people on Twitter. CNN cited just one tweet, and as Mediaite's Tommy Christopher notes, even "a raft of tweets is an awfully low bar for a national news network to claim as a newsworthy movement to have someone fired." (Both Scott Brown and Sarah Palin criticized Harris-Perry's remark but simply demanded an apology, which Harris-Perry later made on Twitter.)

Calls for Harris-Perry's head aside, CNN's report didn't entirely miss the mark: MSNBC seems to have become a hotbed for the untoward in recent weeks. In addition to Baldwin (who made homophobic remarks to a photographer) and Bashir (who suggested Palin be forced to endure slaverly-like conditions), Chris Matthews recently joked that the heavyset Chris Christie crushes his wife during sex.

In Harris-Perry's segment, the host joked about Romney's newly adopted black grandson while one panelist, actress Pia Glenn, sang “one of these things is not like the other” and comedian Dean Obeidallah sought to draw a parallel to the Republican Party's problems with diversity.